How to balance mermaid meta game? Disposable ships? Infinite lives?

There has to be SOME risk though. Otherwise the ability to grief will be way to high and people will not want to play.

I'd say no, unless the souls only count for PvP combat. Being able to screw around and get killed and play with boat mechanics is pretty fun. Would be a pain if that was punished.

edit: I'd vote no on a gold cost for ships as well.

I'm okay with infinite respawn, but I do agree that during a battle maybe a system to capture the spawn point of opposing ships, or hey even better , everytime you die the ghost ship visit is extended by 10 seconds, to give the victorious pirates some time to comfortably loot (Mod Edit) your captains desk without feeling too rushed.

@jackwestburg2 said in How to balance mermaid meta game? Disposable ships? Infinite lives?:

I'm really curious to see how the meta game around abusing game mechanics is going to evolve.

Mermaids: free teleport back to ship, anytime, any ocean.
Ships: disposable, free, infinite replacements, restocked with supplies
Respawning: no penalty other than time spent on ghost ship

I enjoy the forgiving, light-hearted fun the game offers, but I'm curious if there should there be a little more risk/reward to decisions?

Examples of mechanic abuse/cheesing:

-- While being pursued, 3 people from the lead ship jump into the water and try to grab onto the pursuing ship's ladders as they chase. If they miss, it doesn't matter, just mermaid back.

-- Lead your pursuers astray by sailing past an island while you jump off, letting you ship sail off into the sunset. When out of sight, scuttle ship to respawn it, take mermaid back.

-- If you're ship gets stolen, no worries, just take the mermaid teleport to it. If the enemy crew kills your crew, no worries, just keep respawning on your ship. Or just scuttle it.

-- Ran out of planks and cannon balls? Just scuttle and respawn a new ship.

Shouldn't there be at least some small cost to each action? Not as a huge penalty, but at least weigh on the decision making to create a little more depth to the gameplay.

Simply charging gold to respawn ship or use a mermaid probably isn't the answer.
You can charge people time, like on the ghost ship, but waiting for a ship to be built or a mermaid to transport you might not be right either.
Kinda imagine that a new resource or mechanic would need to be introduced to balance these things.

I have an idea...

A Team-based Life Counter: The Soul Lantern

• Each ship hold a Soul Lantern, holding X number of lives
• Every time your team mates respawn, it consumes a life from the ship's Lantern
• Souls can be collected like any inv item, acquired from PVP or PVE (?)
• Souls can be stored in the ship's Lantern, similar to items in barrels
• When the Lantern is empty, your team can't repsawn on the ship until it's refilled
• The Ferry of the Damned gets 2 exits now, one for your ship's Soul Lantern, and the other for an outpost. (so you can choose to wait on the ferry for your team to refill souls or just go to an outpost)
• A Mermaid will charge you a fee of 1 soul (from your personal inventory)
• A ship will cost X gold to rebuild (fee maybe equivalent to rewards of a half-day voyage quest?)

I think this would create a system that still allows you to have fun taking risks while choosing HOW MUCH risk (souls) you want to take. It allows to weigh decisions (in souls) and make judgement calls on can you afford to spend lives doing reckless actions. It also provides an in-world lore explanation for dry game mechanics.

Suddenly the examples I gave first become more interesting. The 3 players trying to swim onto the perusing ship might get stuck in the ocean (and die, taking up time) if they don't have a handy soul to pay the Mermaid. The guy ditching his ship into the sunset will lose his lantern full of souls, but he can collect some more from island PVE. If your ship is being boarded, you'll get plenty of chances to respawn and defend yourself (fun) but not infinitely.

By having a soul resource that goes up and down, collectible and spendable, suddenly you now value your own life a little more. And your team-mates life!

I think this is a cool idea, but I see the logic that some of the other people have posted too. Good to see both sides of this argument. Who knows though, Rare may implement a version of this at some point. They're constantly picking through the forums for fresh ideas. Personally, I'm close to happy with how it is at the moment. I don't like that if me and a crew mate wipe out an attacking galleon, they just respawn quickly and try again. That dislike extends to when I'm in solo mode and try to sneak on to a galleon to ninja their loot... the gamertag visibility makes me easy to spot. I kill a couple of them, they come back and hit me in the back. I do, however, appreciate that my play style is a little different to what's probably the more common style.

It did make me laugh a lot when I heard one of their guys say "errrrrrr guys... we may or may not have someone in our crows nest".

Personally I think we're at a good place and I certainly don't consider any of the systems in place would be considered 'abusing'. What's the alternative to the mermaid when you're stranded at sea, get eaten by sharks? Leaving your ship while sailing for any reason would be a death sentence if you didn't have someone waiting by to drop anchor and let you back on, if you're pursuing another ship you can forget about that happening.

As for 'infinite lives' have you ever been in pvp for an extended period of time? You die A LOT especially when you can be one-shot by a multitude of weapons. If there was more of a penalty for dying idk you'd feel cheated in a way, it's punishing enough when you can't do anything about those who killed you who are now sinking your ship and/or stealing all of your valuables as well as killing the remainder of your crew.

If it wasn't free to spawn in a new ship what if you don't have any gold? Sure, you could hop in matchmaking and have someone else pay for it but how many people would be willing to spend for the same cut of the treasure as everyone else? Aside from that there have been a few instances where I've just spawned a ship and was buying items at the outpost and my ship has spontaneously sunk, if I had to pay to replace it, it would have certainly annoyed me each time it happened. I personally wouldn't bother stealing anyone's ship either, not even because the crew can teleport onto it for as long as it's afloat but because you can't access it's ammo, missions table etc because it's not yours.

The game has been designed around all of its features and if you change one thing -that imo doesn't need changing- you'd need to change a bunch of things to balance it out.

@the-warcrombie It's easy enough to say 'don't die' but it happens, especially when you're outnumbered. Sometimes you'll find yourself in the sea whether you like it or not, maybe you are holding a dunk chest or have had a little too much to drink and take a tumble, or maybe a well aimed cannonball has blasted you overboard.

All the things here, they don't particularly seem problematic to me... Everything works smoothly as is and you get penalized fairly.

@drbullhammer You spawn infinitely with his system as well. You just don't spawn back right where you died. Just like you don't with most of the games you mentioned.

@the-warcrombie Losing your loot and ship seems like a fine penalty to me.

@scheefinator said in How to balance mermaid meta game? Disposable ships? Infinite lives?:

How about instead of trying to make the game easier for everyone. You just focus on better developing your own skills?

How about we try that for a change.

Meh... Everything isn't about skill. It's not only about balance, it's also about what is good for the game itself, at the moment the respawn mechanic is broken and not fun at all. Not for the ones killing everyone and stealing the chests (because enemies are respawning even though they got defeated) and not fun for the guy who just wants to come back and play but gets farmed because people aren't done with his boat.

So yeah, we try to improve the game. But not because we are not good enough (stop projecting yourself in people's posts btw) but because it can be improved for everyone.

@JackWestburg2 That's the first time I see someone suggest an idea for a respawn system, that is really different from my own yet I still like and would be happy to play with. I would add... "You gain a free soul each X minutes without being killed/dieing".

Though I'd like a bit of background to the soul mechanic (with mermaids not with the ferry of the deads). Perhaps it could be a golden currency? Like we need to pay the fee to cross the river when we die (the golden coins on the eyes in some mythologies).

Staf'

In my opinion, in the short term, this isn't a complicated issue. If you sink an enemy ship, that enemy should no longer be able to infinitely respawn on the mermaid. I don't know how you could be more definitively defeated than having your ship destroyed. It's gone. Why are you still respawning in the water? That makes no sense. Let the victor loot your treasure. In the closed beta, contesting with enemies that could infinitely respawn on the mermaid even after their ship was destroyed made it almost impossible to loot the enemy's treasure chests before those chests despawned. Not only that, but the presence of sharks also contributed to this nonsensical filibuster. What do you have to do in this game to win a battle decisively if sinking the ship isn't enough?

In the long term, however, I believe there should be two paths to PVP victory: sinking a ship and dominating an enemy crew by repeatedly killing them. I agree there needs to be some kind of death counting mechanic. Not saying it's a bad idea, but I'm not sure if I agree with a soul counter as a lootable item, though. Have to think about it more.

Just to comment on a couple of your scenarios:

"-- While being pursued, 3 people from the lead ship jump into the water and try to grab onto the pursuing ship's ladders as they chase. If they miss, it doesn't matter, just mermaid back."

Definitely should be punished. I'm not sure I agree with PVE deaths counting toward the soul count. Perhaps Rare could implement a proximity check for nearby ships to engage a pvp timer. If you die within this window, it counts toward the soul limit.

"-- Lead your pursuers astray by sailing past an island while you jump off, letting you ship sail off into the sunset. When out of sight, scuttle ship to respawn it, take mermaid back."

If a player scuttles his ship in this scenario, then that tells me that he didn't have any valuables on his ship to lose in the first place. Doesn't the player also lose his current voyage if he scuttles the ship? That could be incentive enough to put up a fight or try to out run his enemy, especially in later reputation levels where voyages cost hundreds of gold per. Or you could have a gold penalty for scuttling that could scale the more you scuttle. As it stands right now, however, if I were that player, it might be easier simply to log out and find a less active instance. In the closed beta, your ship would also respawn at a fairly close outpost. It wouldn't be all that difficult for an aggressive crew to find you again, and I'm talking from personal experience here. Perhaps a solution here would be to spawn ships further away and put you back on the same instance if you had logged out 15-30 minutes prior, but I wouldn't be surprised if people would wait just to escape an aggressive crew.

"-- If you're ship gets stolen, no worries, just take the mermaid teleport to it. If the enemy crew kills your crew, no worries, just keep respawning on your ship. Or just scuttle it."

"-- Ran out of planks and cannon balls? Just scuttle and respawn a new ship."

Shouldn't there be at least some small cost to each action? Not as a huge penalty, but at least weigh on the decision making to create a little more depth to the gameplay."

Agreed on the rest.